This disclosure relates to a method and a system to perform automated operations for constructing XML documents from source data based on user annotations.
It is often advantageous to retrieve and/or extract particular source data included in a spreadsheet or other document in an automated manner, and in particular to convert spreadsheet data into an XML document. Various approaches have been used to attempt such retrieval or extraction. Examples include manually defining a range of data of interest in a spreadsheet in converting that data into XML; such an approach is both error-prone and slow, especially if the data ranges defined in the spreadsheet change or are modified, and cannot typically handle parent/child relationships defined in the target XML schema. Other examples include saving a spreadsheet into XML directly; however, such approach results in cell-oriented XML files, and extra effort is needed to retrieve particular information of interest from any such XML files.
These and other existing approaches have typically involved operations performed on the entirety of the spreadsheet or other document, and therefore fail to extract particular information of interest, especially where such data includes multiple data tables having differentiated size and scope.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide a method and system to construct XML documents from source data based on user annotations of documents containing that source data.